Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2)

by Merry Ravenell

  His eyes were closed. He was breathing, but he didn’t respond.

  She felt along him for wherever he was bleeding, couldn’t find it in the dark. Marcus was shouting.

  “Lil!” Dietrich shouted. He pulled her off her console, revealing two things:

  The console had exploded.

  And Lil was very dead. Shrapnel from the exploding console and panels had sawed her neck halfway through and removed most of her face.

  Dietrich pawed at her. Malcom put a hand on Dietrich’s shoulder and pulled him away.

  “No!” Dietrich’s voice cracked. “No—”

  Jeremy was in a heap on the other side of the bridge. Lachesis tore herself away from Clint to go to him. She hooked her hand under his arm and tried to lift him.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I—”

  “Malcom,” Lachesis said. “Give me a hand. Dietrich, look at Clint.”

  Malcom hefted Jeremy to his feet. The man howled in pain. His lower left leg was badly broken above the ankle and below the knee. She ran her hands gently along it. No bones protruding, but just held together by skin.

  “Did it during the first shake,” he said through gritted teeth. “Really fucked it now.”

  “No bones through the skin,” she said, “but I can feel it’s broken under that.”

  His leg felt like a sack of seeds: all little pieces shifting around.

  “I can manage. Skin and muscle will hold it together,” he said, breathing hard. “Just get me to a station to lean on, Malcom.”

  “What the hell happened?” Marcus shouted. “Someone tell me what happened?!”

  “We got hit!” Belle shouted at Marcus over the noise. “With a moonlet!”

  “What moonlet?” Marcus shouted, then spun around to Lachesis. “You didn’t tell me about a moonlet!”

  Belle’s eyes widened. “Yes, she did.”

  Marcus put his ass back into the big chair and started to bark orders. “Get the crew inside.”

  Cold horror drowned her hot panic and urgency. What crew? The exterior crew was dead. The ship was damaged, the hull had been breeched. The Core itself might be breeched. The only reason they didn’t have anyone shouting in their ears over comms was the main computer had shut down.

  Everything slowed down as drugs pushed into her system, giving her a surreal, strange rush. Or maybe it was the endorphins. She saw chaos: the pieces of Lil, blood puddling everywhere. Malcom slipped and fell on his ass in the blood. The burning and smoke coming through the vents. The darkness. The dim screens.

  “The exterior crew is dead, Marcus.” Did her words sound cold? She was cold. Empty. Drained.

  Do you think I’d put you into a box with seven of my finest young officers if I thought you’d kill them?

  She wasn’t going to kill them, but Marcus was. She turned her attention to Belle. “Start the main core reboot. Do a reduced load until we know how many chiplets we’ve lost. Jeremy, once comms is online, verify Engineering has the Core stable.”

  Belle moved to her blood-splattered station.

  “Belay that,” Marcus demanded. “Deal with the fire in the belly. We’re keeping going, we’re still here, we know what we have to do.”

  “You haven’t known what to do the past forty-two minutes,” Lachesis said. “We got hit by a moonlet, and you want to deal with a forward hull fire?”

  “If I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.”

  “I’m not giving opinions, I’m giving orders, and now I’m giving you facts: Lil is dead. Clint is dying. Jeremy has a broken leg. Fourteen Crew and four pilots just died on the exterior. Two shuttles are gone. We have no idea how many additional dead or injured we have. The main core shut down. All because you let a moonlet hit the ship because you lost all situational awareness and let your personal bias endanger this ship. You are relieved of command. Sir.”

  Mutiny. She’d just mutinied against her commanding officer.

  And she was numb. Cold.

  Belle reported, “Main core reduced load established. Comms in eighteen seconds. Not sure how much more I’m going to get online.”

  Dietrich put a hand to his ear, then said, hollow, “Engineering says the generator disc just… isn’t there anymore, and they have a primary hull rupture all along the starboard side. Some bulkheads have failed. We’ve lost… people.”

  No shit.

  Marcus said, “Check status of the fire in the—”

  “Get out of that chair,” Lachesis told Marcus.

  The chaos paused again.

  “Get back to your station,” Marcus snarled. “Malcom, continue fire suppression protocols.”

  Belle twisted around. “We have to start evacuation of lower decks and start sealing bulkheads and filling the computer core with—”

  “Do as you’re ordered,” Marcus snarled.

  Lachesis ignored Marcus. “The Captain has been relieved of command. Belle, I need whatever navigation and helm control you can bring online. Then start sealing bulkheads and start the core preservation protocols. Jeremy, you’re XO now. Start evacuation of all lower decks and tell Crèche to start emergency genetic material preservation.”

  “Belay that,” Marcus said.

  Clearly, Marcus wasn’t getting the message this wasn’t his show any longer. Lachesis curled her fingers, itching to shift into her war-form and paint the wall with him. “I’ve had enough of you. Get out of that chair. You’re done.”

  “Acting like a feral now,” Marcus said.

  “This is my box now,” she growled, heart pounding so fast she didn’t feel the beats. “Belle, carry out my orders. Marcus, since you’re so devoted to those fire protocols, you can work on that.”

  Marcus raised his chin with a smirk. “They won’t obey you, they know it’s mutiny. They’ll fail if they follow you.”

  Lachesis looked around the shattered box. “Tell Lil she failed. I’m sure she’ll gladly fail to get her life back.”

  Silence as smoke drifted into the box.

  Belle spun back around in her chair. “Yes, ma’am. Starting main core preservation protocols.”

  “Belay that!” Marcus shouted at her.

  Lachesis grabbed Marcus by the hair and yanked his head to the side. He didn’t know she couldn’t shift. “You’re done. Transfer command.”

  “Fuck you!” Marcus didn’t dare pull away.

  She yanked, somehow finding the strength to drag him out of the chair. She stumbled backwards, and he came with her, and she smashed his face into the helm.

  She leaned onto his head, breathing hard, heart racing, sweat pouring off her. Her vision dimmed. Needles stabbed into her arm, the implant burned inside her heart.

  Jeremy dragged himself the rest of the way to his station.

  >> CONFIRM NEW OFFICER-IN-COMMAND <<

  >> Y/N <<

  “Do it,” Lachesis snarled, leaning hard on his head.

  “This is mutiny!”

  She shoved harder. “You’ve already said that.”

  “You’ll get riddled with silver for this!”

  “Have to survive first,” she hissed. “One.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Two.” She shoved her finger into his ear, and pushed. He didn’t know she wasn’t about to shift forms and pierce his brain with a war-form claw.

  He slapped his hand onto the panel.

  >> OFFICER-IN-COMMAND CONFIRMED: LACHESIS <<

  Lachesis dropped him and sat down in the big chair.

  “You’re done,” Marcus told her. “Your career is over, you fucking feral!”

  “And maybe if we’re lucky, you'll still be alive to gloat over it. Start running interior radiation evacuations and monitor interior radiation levels. We’ve got a hull rupture and lost tiles, presume we’re getting cooked,” she said.

  “You don’t know how many tiles we’ve lost,” he spat.

  “No, I don’t. Which is why I want you to monitor the interior radiation levels.” She felt around on the arm of the Captain
’s chair, then pulled a tiny handle on the underside. It unfolded a triple panel of tablet-sized screens on a slender metal arm. “Engineering, I need a report.”

  “We’re busy down here,” an unknown voice shouting over the general sound of mayhem told her. Were they having fun running around screaming and banging on sheets of metal?

  She almost laughed, then remembered that she was probably going to die in the next eighteen minutes from acute radiation poisoning. “I need to position this ship before we eat a solar flare, so someone tell me what shape the ship is in. Unless you want to spend your last hour of life vomiting uncontrollably while your body burns from the inside out.”

  A pause, then, “No, ma’am, that sounds like a bad time.”

  Half a dozen voices then reported, each one chaotic and desperate: the hull had been peeled up like a carrot, massive swaths of tiles were gone, radiation was building, temperatures were dropping, massive decompressions, bulkheads had been blown out, the generator disc was so badly damaged it was gone. They were venting breathable air and potable water, and the forward hull was still on fire.

  Good times.

  Belle leaned away from her blood-splattered station. “That’s all the computer function I can get, Lake. I wouldn’t even trust our Telemetry or positioning systems. The wiremesh is fucked sideways.”

  “I think that’s how the moonlet plowed into us, yes,” Lachesis said, keying through the panels trying to figure out if she could coax more control out of the system.

  Malcom hacked a laugh. “It wanted to be the little spoon.”

  “It did get ejected from all its buddies. It needed a new friend,” Belle said, laughing a bit too crazy.

  Jeremy, clammy and a little out of his mind, said, “It just needed to cuddle.”

  Lachesis cracked a smile, but tried to stay focused on the fact they were all less than half an hour away from a really ugly death. “Belle, find out if this ship has a flight mode called reduced alternate law.”

  This was still survivable: she had a stable Core, both engines (no generator disc, but two engines), and primitive computer function.

  But first there was a solar flare coming their way.

  And Clint was still alive, but dying. She needed to find her way out of this puzzle and get him out of here.

  Belle reported, “We do. What the hell feature set is that?”

  “It’s the everything else is broken flight system that keeps the ship level and nothing else,” Lachesis said. “Shut it off.”

  “Just… shut it off?” Belle asked.

  “Yes.”

  Malcom asked, “If that’s all that’s flying the ship, should we do that?”

  “I’m flying the ship.” Lachesis highlighted several stars to determine her bearings, created an artificial horizon, then overlaid NightPiercer’s current hull balance onto it. The balance readings were powered by gyroscopes: an almost three hundred-year-old technology. It’d been included on the ships as a low-effort, low-cost, low-weight option-of-utter-last-resort. “Jeremy.”

  “Ma’am,” he said, gray and clammy with pain.

  “We’re going to take a radiation bath.”

  He nodded grimly.

  “How tight can we pack the crew into the interior of the ship, and how many acceleration harnesses are in those bunks?”

  He blinked, then it dawned on him what she was asking. “We can make it work. Standard evacuation groupings?”

  “Cram them in as tight as you can, and tell them if they can’t get to a cabin, get somewhere interior and hold on to something.”

  “But you can’t spool the engines. We won’t outrun the blast.”

  “Not the plan. Malcom, call down to Crew. Tell them we need them to open all the brown lines and flood the lower decks. If there’s a line with liquid water in it, open it.”

  “Flood the lowest decks with sewage?” Malcom asked.

  “Even milk vats, cheese vats, algae vats, whatever they can use. I don’t care. Dide, start a timer. Twelve minutes and tell everyone to hold the fuck on, AG failure protocol.”

  Her heart was beating so fast, so hard she barely felt the beats, just the constant pain and pressure of the implant burning her.

  “Got time to tell me why?” Dietrich asked.

  She didn’t, but Jeremy had already figured it out. “Water absorbs radiation. She’s packing people in tight for as many walls between them and the blast and then flooding whatever she can with water.”

  “But—well, okay,” Dietrich said. “Will that… work?”

  “It’s better than hope and prayer,” Belle said wryly.

  Her fingers rested on the triple panel. “Engineering.”

  “Engineering here,” Juan’s voice said.

  “Transfer all throttle and engine control to bridge.”

  A pause. “All of it?”

  “All of it. I’m going to do a full asymmetrical burn. Oh, and hold on to something.”

  “The flight computer can’t fly asymmetrical. It will error out.”

  “The flight computer is dead in a corner. I’m hand-flying by gyroscope and star chart.”

  “Well, shit,” Juan said, his tone grave.

  “Yeah, I said to myself when I got told I’d have to hand fly if necessary that we’d probably already have been dead for five minutes. Still alive for now, so ahead of the curve.”

  “How’s it looking up there?” Juan’s tone sounded soft, serious. He knew he was likely talking to a dead wolf, and they’d be scraping their burned bodies out of that box.

  Lachesis took quick stock. “Like a shuttle that’s been blown apart. Just a lot bigger.”

  “Sounds like just another day of Operations thinking they know how to run a ship.”

  “Sounds like you need to harness in before your mouth gets you dropped on your head,” she said as she pulled her own emergency harness over her shoulders and buckled up.

  “What the hell is a gyroscope?” Malcom asked.

  “Three hundred-year-old analog technology.” Lachesis focused on her star charts and observing the balance readings to get an idea of the ship’s current attitude.

  “Dide, Marcus, get Clint strapped into a seat,” Jeremy directed as he buckled himself into the XO chair close to hers.

  Ninety seconds.

  They finished strapping the injured Clint to a seat and hurried to strap themselves down.

  “Five seconds, Jeremy. Warn the ship to hold on,” Lachesis said.

  Five seconds later, she fired engine one.

  The box obediently started to roll hard to port, shaking and throbbing. The noise was terrible. With most of the computer dead, no alarms sounded.

  She fixed her eye on the false horizon as the ship’s balance rotated against the horizon, indicating (she hoped) the ship’s roll in space.

  Her shoulder harness started to dig into her neck. The box kept tilting until it actually stopped moving, but the feedback kept going until her balance readings said she had the ship at about a sixty-four degree angle, exposing the ship’s ceramic-plated, shit-filled belly to the incoming flare.

  The thing about solar flares was they didn’t smash into the ship. They aren’t even visible.

  But the handful of remaining sensors confirmed the flare hit them.

  They were still alive. For now. And she didn’t smell ozone. And nobody puked.

  She keyed in commands, bringing engine two up to sixty percent of idle power very slowly, while setting the other engine to power down. The box stayed at its wonky angle, and started to tremble and generally make awful noises, but careful adjustments of the engines flew the ship back to level.

  She took a deep breath, dripping sweat, shaking, exhausted.

  To Jeremy, she said, voice hoarse. “Start counting how many we lost.”

  “Ma’am,” he said, voice like his throat was so dry it’d turned sticky. He unbuckled his harness.

  The screen flickered, erasing her star charts.

  >> TEST OVER <<

/>   Where Blame Lies

  She stumbled against the wall. Jeremy’s family raced forward to catch him and drag him the rest of the way down the corridor. So many voices and words amounting to we’re here, we’re here, we saw.

  She turned around, back against the wall, and sank down on the ground. Sweat, blood, debris, dust, smoke clung to her hair and uniform. Her hands hurt. Her body felt empty.

  Medical had come for Jeremy and Clint. She watched Clint get carried away, and Jeremy gingerly limping against two Medical officers, his leg visibly buckling.

  The corridor emptied.

  Finally, another Medical team marched towards the door. They were carrying a stretcher with a black blanket.

  Ten minutes later, they returned with the stretcher, the black blanket now unfurled across a body, the emblem of NightPiercer painted across it, and weighted tassels at each corner fluttering with the motion of their walk.

  Lachesis pushed herself up along the wall.

  The Medical team disappeared to the right down another corridor, and Lachesis limped into the main square.

  Families and well-wishers crowded into the brightly lit square, hugging and dusting off and congratulating her crew. They were all sitting slurping drinks or rubbing themselves with towels or just sitting, staring at nothing while their loved ones buzzed around them like attentive bees.

  Somewhere, a group of them were sobbing.

  Lil had died, but everyone else had made it out alive. Sort of.

  She felt her way to a dimly lit corner and sank down again.

  Statistically, two people weren’t going to make it out of the box. She, also statistically, should have been one of the fatalities.

  Instead, she’s survived by becoming what everyone feared she was.

  Keenan was probably having a great laugh.

  The test had been designed to break them. She’d broken and done the unthinkable and unforgivable.

  The square cleared out as everyone rounded up their wits and Medical made off with the less critically ill of her crew.

  There were still stragglers talking, but none of them seemed to notice her. Getting back to her feet to walk back to her bunk seemed impossible. Not just because her body said it was, but because there was no point. One of her team was dead. One was dying. One had a shattered leg and might die of it.